Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 173, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1913 — Short Sermons FOR A Sunday Half=Hour [ARTICLE]

Short Sermons FOR A Sunday Half=Hour

A GOSPEL OF LEISURE.

By REV. GEORGE CLARKE PECK.

"Como ye yourselves apart Into a desert place, and rest awhlfe.”—Mark vL, 81. ■ _ L.. 20

Life is not all work days; it inetudes holidays. To know the importance and use of • "day off" la <m>y lees vital than to realise the importance and use of •day on." Every man should understand both the Gospel of Toll and the Gospel of Leisure, But a real Googol of Leisure can never be preached to any except tired people. One of my friends used to boast that he had ndt taken a summer holiday in sixteen years. He looked so righteous when ho said it that he made the rest of us feel half ashamed that we were planning for a summer vacation. Moreover, he was a devout man. But his boasting was Uke that which one might make concerning the magnitude of the mortgage on his house or the number of carbuncles he had undergone. Weariness is a claim. AU the world needs an outing. Millions of people need fresh air more than they need an extra sermon. They are too tired to do themselves credit either at work or at church. Oh, the heaven of giving a heaven of respite to jaded bodies and springtese minds! Real leisure must always be earned. By sweat of brew or brain or soul a man must earn his vacation or he will not know what to do with it when he gets it. There Is no such thing es summer holiday aflart from winter workday. The man who failed to put his whole self into his winter's task, the woman who has dawdled and dreamed through a series oi society functions, is ho better qualified to "enjoy" a month of leisure than a sturgeon would be to "enjoy ” s a walk up Broadway. No use to talk about giving vacations to ourselves or others. We cannot give them; they must be earned. Leisure is one of the beautiful things which must be sweat tor before it can be truly possessed.

Vacation —where? In the country if possible. No subeHtute for Mather Nature as a rest gfver has yet been discovered. To get away from the things which man hen made or marred and to get close to things as they come from the hands of God fa a means of re-creation. You can remember the days when your mother took you up into her top and crooned over you and soothed you. Was there ever any other rest like that? I doubt tt. The nearest approach to It, however, is found in the top of nature. By some brook which has been running for ages, under stars which have scarcely winked since Abraham’s day, out on the sea with its reaches of silver and mountains cf form, fdHowlng the trout or study Ing the habits of the thrush, we shall find the most perfect i< ’.'wariness of limb in such avocai. '. refresh the souL "The world to too much with us late and soon, and we must freshen and resanctMy ourselves in the quiet of field ot MIL"